August 13, 2014

I nearly wrote this very lengthy post, an essay really, about what Robin Williams meant to me and the impact he had on my life.

I talked about how when I was a child and sitting home alone all day while my parents were at work, my two best friends were my dog and Mork (thanks to back to back episodes shown in syndication.)

Nanu nanu.

You cannot begin to fathom the impact of Dead Poets Society on my life, how many different formats I’ve owned that film, or how many times I’ve seen it. It lead me to so many good and perfect things. Least of which, I can quote a number of Whitman poems thanks to that movie. Every summer when the blooms on our lilac bush die, I stand on the front porch with the dog and recite the first stanza to one of Uncle Walt's poems:

When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,

And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,

I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.

Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,

Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,

And thought of him I love.

Good Will Hunting is the same.

When the lovely wife’s eyes started getting really bad, we sat down and watched a number of movies together that meant a lot to us. One of them was Good Will Hunting. The thing that really struck me on that rewatch, especially now being an adult going through the beginning of a crisis of my own, now no longer a teenager who connected with Matt Damon or Ben Affleck’s characters, was how moved I was by Robin’s performance as Will’s therapist. The “I will end you” scene floored me.

I wrote about all that in great detail.

Then deleted it for the beginning of a very angry post about the people who’ve felt the need to either be dismissive or say nasty, hurtful things. But I deleted that too. They don’t deserve the satisfaction. We currently live under the tyrrany of petty and ignorant men, but that will change. Let them stew in their chosen misery and turn your face away from their offered cup of bitterness. Some day they too will have a moment of awareness and see, as their lives draw to a close, how they will soon sink beneath a dark and lonely ocean of tears to be forgotten.

(And that's something else too, if I can take a moment. Journalism is mostly dead. So in the days to come you will see the ghouls on the march, hoping to join the trolls. The buzzards have already circled. Ignore them. Don't click. Don't share. Don't listen. You do not have to engage.)

The whole time I struggled with what I wanted to write, I kept thinking about Edwin Arlington Robinson’s poem Richard Cory. And I think that’s something to remember. How sometimes the stories we tell ourselves about other people can be just as deceitful and unhelpful as the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.

But even that somehow feels too dark, I think.

For me, the thing I keep reading that sticks out in my mind, the thing I want to keep hold of is how many times Robin went out of his way to cheer people up when they were sad or suffering or even just nervous. That’s a fucking legacy right there. It doesn’t need any eloquence to prop it up, it doesn’t require any spirituality, it just is. On the most basic human level, it's fucking gobsmackingly beautiful. It's something anyone could and should be proud of, cold hearted internet sonsofbitches be damned.

So that’s what I think you should do, if you want to honor Robin. Don’t be sad. Don’t even sit at home and watch a marathon of his films. Don’t share some motto or meme or phone number. Go connect with another human being right now. I guarantee you that you know someone who is depressed or sad or suffering or worried or nervous or frightened or even just lonely. When was the last time you spoke to them? When was the last time you made them laugh? Reminded them that you cared? Now's a good time. Right now. Go. Call them up. Knock on their door. And when they answer, tell them, “Robin sent me.”

August 11, 2014

I’m a longtime John D. MacDonald fan, honestly still in awe of the quality of his prodigious output. Years ago, coming out of a lengthy Travis McGee bender, I read The Red Hot Typewriter: The Life and Times of John D. MacDonald by Hugh Merrill.

Starting at the bottom of page 71, Merrill reprints a funny spoof of Mickey Spillane that JDM sent Dick Carroll, his editor at Gold Medal, following their publication of The Brass Cupcake:

"It was one of those afternoons when the greasy sunshine flooded Third Avenue like a men’s room with a broken john. She came out of the alley lapping at her juicy red lips with her pointed spicy tongue.

I shouldered her out of the way and blew the smoke off of the end of the rod. He lay there in the alley and he was dead. I don’t know why I did it but I aimed at him and blew off the other half of his greasy skull. It was a dirty world full of dirty people and I was sick of it. I felt the crazy anger welling up in me. He lay there in the alley and he was dead. She rubbed her thorax against me. I blasted his teeth out through the back of his neck.

Pat shouldered her out of the way. He was picking his greasy teeth with a broken match. A smart cop, that Pat.

'I knew you was going to go kill crazy again, Mike. This has got to stop.'

I knew it couldn’t stop. Not while there were people left in the world. Dirty people in a dirty world. I had to kill all that I could. Even if they lifted my license. He lay there in the greasy alley in the greasy Third Avenue sunshine and he was dead and I was glad I’d shot his greasy skull apart.

'Mike, Mike,' she gasped, stabbing her tongue into my ear. It tickled.

I fingered her haunch, then shoved her away hard. She looked at me with those wide, spicy hot eyes.

'You haven’t fooled me a bit,' I rasped. Then I laughed. My laugh sounded like two Buicks rubbing together.

She knew what I meant. She said, 'Look what I can give you, Mike.' She unlatched her Maidenform.

I looked at it. I felt the sadness, the regret. But the anger was there. Pat sucked on the greasy match. He turned his head. He was a good cop.

The first shot nailed her against the alley wall. While she was slipping, her eyes still pleading with me, I wrote my initials across her gut with hot lead. It was tricky shooting.

Pat sighed. He said, 'Mike, the D.A.’ll have something to say about this.'

'Screw the D.A.,' I said. My voice sounded like a lead nickel in a stone jukebox.

We walked out of the alley, down through the soggy sunshine. Somehow, I felt very tired."

See. It’s funny, right? I thought so then, and still think so now. Though it's also a little sad that the genre is still overrun with prose and thought that still amounts to: “a dirty world full of dirty people…”